Dangerous (39 page)

‘Paulie? He was supposed to touch base with you, that right?’

Paulie nodded. ‘But he hasn’t, boss. Not a word, not a call, nothing.’

Sears’s boxer dog sniffed around his feet, hungry and hoping for a titbit. Sears kicked the dog away. It yelped, and sloped off to lie down on the other side of the room.

‘Calm down,’ said Ivan, perturbed to see his brother in such a state. This rate, they’d
never
get back up to Manchester to wave Ma a not-so-fond farewell. He was going to have to take this situation in hand, he could see it.

‘Somebody find him,’ said Fulton, fumbling to light a fag with his shaking bandaged hands. A couple of months on from what she had done to him, and his wounds were healing. But his heart wasn’t. He’d loved her. Truly, deeply. But now that love was gone, turned to bitter hatred, he was stoked up on puff and coke and he wanted her
dead
.

‘Somebody do it,
right now
.’

100

You were only as good as your last envelope, the boys had told Henry when he’d first started working for Fulton Sears, and it was true. He did the milk round, collected cash from stalls and restaurants that paid protection, and every time you had to come back with a nice thick wedge of loot in the envelope, or you were in big trouble.

Fortunately, Henry had a talent for collecting cash.

‘You got the money?’ he would ask when he first started on the job. Of course they would try it on, test his mettle.

He always thought of it like that when the fucks wouldn’t pay up, or they said they’d have it next week, or they said they only had part of it and the rest would follow: they were ‘testing his mettle’, seeing how far they could push it.

Not very far at all was the answer to that. Henry had a straight choice, it seemed to him: either he got the cash, or he got a kicking from Sears. So he had to get the cash, and get it he did.

‘You got the money?’ he asked now, talking to a big fat Italian who ran a profitable trattoria off Queen Street, all decked out in red, green and white like the Italian flag, his two sons flipping pizzas out the back room with the scent of garlic and fried tomatoes wafting out into the restaurant, the whole family working away front of house and back, and Sears skimming a good bit off the top so that they never got any trouble.

Of course, fail to pay Fulton Sears and there would be trouble, big-style. Bloke was about as stable as sweating gelignite, and he was getting worse by the day. Word on the street was that Clara had given Fulton Sears his marching orders from the club doors; some people were even saying that Fulton Sears had come on to Clara, gone up to her office with a full set of fingers and come back down with most of them missing and his balls damned near kicked into orbit. But he couldn’t believe
that
. Now big brother Ivan had shown up, and the whole thing looked like it was about to blow.

The man paid up straight away and Henry moved on to his next target, a brand-new dry-cleaning business, so the new owners were Soho virgins and of course they had no idea how this thing worked. Henry walked into the store and the bell over the door dinged. He was assailed by chemical odours.

‘Stinks in these places,’ he said to the blond guy behind the counter, who was taking a soiled brown garment from a customer for cleaning.

‘That’s the perc,’ said the blond.

‘The what?’ asked Henry, not that he gave a fuck.

‘Perchloroethylene,’ said the man. ‘Otherwise known as tetrachloethydene.’

Henry was looking around at all the big plastic-coated wedding dresses and full-length curtains hanging around the sides of the shop. He could see the back of the shop through an open doorway. There was a whoosh of steam as garments were pressed and finished. Several people were working back there, filling machines, operating dryers, including a darkhaired woman who glanced at Henry with suspicion.

‘Got my money?’ asked Henry when the customer had departed, clutching her ticket.

‘Ah!’ The guy was all big smiles; he was fresh-faced as a school kid. ‘Well, here’s part of it,’ he said, and whipped open the till and handed Henry an envelope. Henry opened it, counted it; fifty pounds short.

‘I’ll have the rest by Friday,’ he was rattling on, smiling.

‘No, this afternoon,’ said Henry, pocketing the envelope.

‘Well, as I said—’

‘No.’ Henry held up a hand, stopping the flow of words. ‘I want my money and I want it by two o’clock. All right?’

The smile was still in place. ‘As I tried to explain—’

‘I’ll be back at two,’ said Henry, and left.

The blond guy was still smiling, silly cunt.

Henry called back in at two o’clock and he had Joey with him – six feet of uncomplicated muscle.

The blond guy with the professional happy smile came to the counter again.

‘The money?’ asked Henry.

‘As I told you—’ said the blond guy.

He didn’t have time to get another word out. Joey pulled him over the counter and whacked him on the jaw. He went down in front of the counter like a sack of shit, knocking over a display of multicoloured cotton reels and assorted shoe dyes and brushes. Both Henry and Joey waded in to give him the kicking he deserved. Shrieks and shouts went up from the back room, and the dark-haired woman ran out to the front of the shop and yelled: ‘I’ll call the police!’

By then they were finished with the guy, who lay groaning and blood-covered on the floor.

Henry pointed a finger at him as he lay there, wincing, clutching his bruised stomach, blinking up at his attackers in stark terror, pain and amazement.

‘Half an hour, arsehole. We’ll be back and you’d better have it.’

Henry and Joey left to the merry tinkling accompaniment of the shop bell.

Half an hour later, they were back. The dark-haired woman hadn’t phoned the police. The blond man was propped behind the till on a stool, white-faced, bloodstained and not smiling any more. When he saw Henry and Joey come back in, he opened the till straight away with a shaking hand, and gave Henry another envelope with the fifty pounds inside.

‘Now, why the fuck couldn’t you do that in the first place?’ asked Henry, pocketing the cash.

‘Bloody
arseholes
,’ said the blond man, trembling with anger. ‘You
bastards
.’

‘You better remember that,’ said Henry. Then he and Joey moved on to their next venue.

Before they could get there, Clara came up to them in the street, Liam dragging his knuckles along the pavement by her side. She’d tried to catch Henry at home, but his landlady had said he was out at work. She’d looked for him around the area, and here he was, coming out of the dry cleaners while stuffing something in his pocket. He saw her there, turned to Joey and said: ‘Wait in the car.’

‘That’s
her
, yeah?’ said Joey.

‘Wait in the car,’ said Henry more sharply.

Joey went. Henry looked into his sister’s face. ‘What’s up, you got a death wish or something?’ he asked her.

‘I want to talk,’ said Clara.

‘You’re crazy.’

‘About Sal,’ said Clara.

Henry exhaled. ‘Who?’

‘Sal Dryden. A worker of mine. The woman was killed. But you and she were close for a while.’

‘OK,’ he said. ‘So talk.’

101

They walked in Soho Square, skirting the statue and coming to a halt beside the little Tudor-style summer house. The venerable old Windmill was a few steps away in Great Windmill Street, the Oak was on the corner opposite, and Raymond’s Revue Bar was at Walker’s court with its massive sign, just a stone’s throw away. This – the Square Mile of Vice – was her homeland now. Soho, with its seedy alleyways, its strip joints and its teeming mass of humanity, had become a part of her; it was in her blood.

‘Fulton Sears is after you,’ said Henry.

‘I know.’ Clara indicated Liam, skulking not three feet away. ‘Look, I brought reinforcements.’

‘He got a hit ordered on you, but word is the guy’s gone AWOL. Don’t know why you ain’t dead right now, frankly.’

Clara knew. The hitman was dead – not her. Marcus had seen to that. But Sears would catch up. Once he realized his hired gun was done for, no doubt he’d come at her with another one, or with something different, something worse.

She’d learned a lot in life, but what she’d learned most clearly was that she’d spent nearly ten years chasing after security of one sort or another, only to discover that there was no security to be had anywhere, except in yourself, in your own strength.

So she wasn’t running away from her fears any more: she was running
toward
them, determined to crush them, once and for all.

‘What you want to talk to me for?’ asked Henry.

‘Someone told me you had a thing going with Sal.’

‘Yeah. For a while last year.’

‘Didn’t it worry you? Going where Yasta Frate went first?’

‘I knew about that.’ Henry frowned. ‘I knew what happened. That Frate came over on the boat and leeched off Sal. She told me. It was no big secret. Besides, it was over. He was her landlord and she wasn’t happy about that, but there you go.’

‘It wasn’t
that
over. She had some porno pics taken with him last summer. Him and an assortment of kids, I might add.’

Henry was watching her face. ‘I heard something about that,’ he said. ‘The Bill questioned him. Got nowhere, of course. Big surprise.’

Clara returned his look with a stony glare. ‘Maybe you wanted to pay Sal back for getting involved with Frate again.’

Clara had no illusions about her brother. He’d been bad all his life, and she couldn’t think that he would have changed now, not when he was mixing with lowlife like Sears and his boys.

‘So what happened? You have a fight over those pictures, lose it, kill her?’ asked Clara.

Henry stopped walking and stared at her. ‘
What?
Hey—’

‘Come on, Henry. You’ve done things. Terrible things. I don’t think you’d draw the line at this. I don’t think you even know where the line is.’

Henry was shaking his head. ‘I was sorry as hell over what happened to Sal.’

‘So you’re saying you had no part in it?’ Clara stared at him. He was wearing the same obdurate expression that he’d worn when questioned at twelve years old, and at fifteen. Now he was seventeen, a young man, and she still didn’t trust him an inch. ‘What about the house fire, Henry?’

‘Now what you on about?’

‘My house burned down. Toby was killed. Didn’t you like the thought of me doing well at last? Did you really hate me that much?’

Henry was still shaking his head. ‘Jesus, you don’t change. Anything that happened, it was always my fault, wasn’t it? And it still is.’

‘Well, you said it. Remember the money you stole? And the dog? That poor bloody tutor, how you battered him? Now I guess you’ve moved on to bigger things. Like Sal. Like Toby.’

Henry was silent for a beat, biting his lip. Then he said: ‘You seriously think I did Sal? And Toby Cotton? Fuck’s sake! I didn’t even know the guy.’

‘Yeah, but I know you, Henry. Remember?’

Henry looked her full in the face. ‘You’re wrong,’ he said.

Clara’s expression hardened. ‘I just said it, Henry. I know you, better than anyone else.’

‘Better than Bernie?’

‘Yeah. Even her.’

‘I dunno why you’re concerning yourself with all this shit,’ said Henry. ‘You got enough problems. You got Fulton Sears on your back and now his big brother Ivan’s come down from Manchester to help out. Ivan’s the head of the clan, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of
that
bastard, believe me.’

‘You enjoy working for that pig?’

‘It’s a job. It’s a living. Better than working for you, I bet. You got to fix everybody’s lives up for them, ain’t you, Clara? You got to be in control. Poor fucking Bernie couldn’t even marry that pitiful bastard photographer of hers, because he didn’t come up to scratch in your eyes.’

‘He
didn’t
come up to scratch, you got that right. He was the one who took the pictures. Frate paid big money for them, big enough to get David started in business.’

‘Yeah? Well, maybe he is a bad apple, but it was her choice, not yours. And
she
ain’t all that, anyway. Thank fuck I got out from under your little dictatorship years ago. I’m not sorry about that.’

Clara frowned. What did
that
mean? ‘Henry—’

‘No. The answer is no. I didn’t do Sal and I didn’t torch your house. You can believe that or not, I don’t give a shit either way, all right?’ He turned away from her. Then he paused, turned back. ‘You think it was all
me
, don’t you? Always, it was
me
. I was the bad one, the one who did wrong.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The fucking dog, Clara. Think about it. I wasn’t the only person in that house. Yeah, I stepped up and took it on the chin because I was only a kid and I was scared shitless of the consequences. Like they say, sis:
The truth will out.
’

Clara was so shocked that she could only stare at him. She could feel the sun, beating down on her skin, could hear the traffic, could see people moving around them, but she felt stilled, trapped in time, caught in a bubble of sick awareness where the only focus was Henry’s words.

‘What are you saying?’ she gasped out at last. ‘What the hell are you
saying
?’

He shook his head at that. ‘Nah, I’ve said enough. Look – don’t come near me again. Joey’s seen us talking and that’s gonna be hard enough to explain away. I don’t want Sears getting any doubts about whose side I’m on in this little war we got going on here. You understand me?’

‘You’re on
his
side,’ said Clara. Jesus,
what
was that he’d said?

‘Remember that,’ said Henry.

‘Oh God,’ she murmured. ‘Oh no . . . ’

Into her mind then came Jasper, saying he’d passed Bernie in the hall on the night of Toby’s death, at ten o’clock. And now it came to Clara that Bernie had appeared in front of her hours after that, when the fire was raging. She’d assumed that Bernie had just come home then.

‘Oh, please, no,’ said Clara. But she knew the truth now; she knew it. ‘I have to talk to her.’